Monday, 14 May 2012

I tried to recreate the blend shader with Strumpy Shader Editor. I haven't quite got it yet. I need to work out how to access a single vertex colour channel. It looks like it's using all three and ends up blending too much of the top layer.

I haven't managed to get normal maps working yet either.

I also set up some lights and baked a lightmap. Looks pretty nice I think.

I got the beautiful Art of Uncharted 2 art book for Christmas and I just had to make something based on one of the concepts.

This was a nice one. Detailed, but fairly small and self contained. And I know where it is in the game, so I could check that out to see how it compared.

Terrible scan, sorry about that. Painted by James Paick for Naughty Dog.

So I've been making something based on that in my spare time over the last couple of months. I've not had very long on it in any one sitting. I've also been using it as a mock game project, writing down bugs and ideas for improvements for 3DSMax from an environment art perspective while I went. Which took quite some time.

I made a simple blend shader that's similar to the one used in Uncharted2. The normals are pretty messed up in the Max viewport though so it's got slightly weird lighting.

I don't know if I'll have time to work on it any more in the near future. There's plenty more I could do to it. But it's an ok place to leave it for now. I've exported the data and I'm attempting to get it working in Unity. I'll post the results from that in another post.

I managed to UV the dynamesh model with Zbrush's UV master and took it into Mudbox to paint up the textures more thoroughly.

Mudbox's texture layers were way faster and easier to work with than Zbrush's poly paint. And I could make other material channels. Wish there was an easy way to duplicate a whole layer stack though. Duplicating them all and setting up the masks again was a pain. Especially as I encountered a bug preventing me reloading the scene after I'd duplicated all the texture layers and had to do it all again. Good job the textures saved ok so I could just load them up on an older file.

Sunday, 4 March 2012

Much more refined clothing, better hands, added his tail (simple zsphere chain), refined his head. Mesh extract gave me separate finger and toe nails. Added a bit of asymmetry and changed the overall silhouette to more closely match the original character.

I'm about done with the dynamesh now. I can convert it to a standard subdivided model for the detail from now on.

About Me

I've been a videogame artist for about 12 years. Most of this has been spent working at tiny devs on handheld platforms so I haven't had the opportunity to get into high res sculpts commercially. Digital sculpting is something I've been getting into in my spare time.